Housing starts drop…will the interest rate?
Posted on Jul 17, 2024
With another Bank of Canada announcement coming next week (July 24), the impact of high interest rates continues to slow the housing industry. Investors or contractors have little interest in starting when they don’t know what the end game will be.
Will there be buyers? At what price? At what cost? The higher interest rates are discouraging some of...
Just the facts: reflecting on the job markets
Posted on Jul 10, 2024
Employment begets the economy and the economy begets the real estate market. This blog is a simple factual report on employment in Canada, courtesy off the B.C. Real Estate Association.
Last month, Canadian employment was slightly unchanged from May, to 20.516 million, a drop of less than one per cent, leaving unemployment one per cent higher than i...
The law about wood-burning fireplaces
Posted on Jun 17, 2024
Of all the strategies to address the many tentacles of climate change, a story in The Vancouver Sun discovered what seems to be a new one…both the tentacle and the strategy.
To help keep the air cleaner, wood-burning fireplaces must be registered in Metro Vancouver.
In reality, registering said fireplaces has been a law since 2020. Now it’s going to...
New budget, new help for first-time home buyers
Posted on May 12, 2024
The Federal Government has announced plans to “solve the housing crisis” as part of the proposed budget this year, plans directed in part to first-time home buyers. Like many such proposals, it’s (a) complex and (b) not for everybody who is buying a home for the first time.
Here is what is in the budget, which still has to receive royal ascent:
• An...
Interest rate remains the same — for now
Posted on Apr 10, 2024
Economists across the country are waiting for the Bank of Canada shoe to drop and send the interest rate down from the 5 per cent it has been for 10 months. Now it appears that will happen on June 5.
The just-announced decision to leave the rate unchanged brought this response from BNN Bloomberg’s Paul Bagnell, in an interview on CTV:
“In the subtle...
Commercial real estate primed to rebound in '24
Posted on Mar 25, 2024
The figures are just in for commercial real estate in 2023 and what’s clear is it likely has only one direction to go, and that’s up. Sales totals and dollar volumes in the Lower Mainland were lower than they had been since before the pandemic, and both sales and dollar values were down over 40 per cent compared to 2022.